Contrary to what most asian parents think, the worst thing that a child can tell his parents about his future isn’t that he wants to be an actor or writer. The worst thing that a child can tell his parents about his future is that he wants to be a lawyer.
Highlights of life as a civil litigator:
- No one, and I mean no one, likes you. Plaintiff clients don’t like you because they had to hire you and pay you to get something they feel is rightfully theirs anyway. Defendant clients hate you because they had to hire you out of self-preservation. Neither is good. All clients don’t like you because you charge rates that seem way too high, especially in light of the fact that they hate their situation and they hate you. Your opponents hate you for obvious reasons. Judges hate you because you contribute to their impossibly huge backlog of cases. I used to think that dentists had it tough because none of their patients really wants to see them. But they actually have it fairly good.
- Most “good” litigators are assholes, and if they’re not assholes, they’re extremely arrogant, overly self-absorbed and overly confrontational. They have to be. They’re nothing more than hired guns who are hired to achieve their clients’ objective. And the profession rewards all of these character traits. Anyone without any of these traits is doomed in this profession. And anyone who has any of these traits will realize that the profession magnifies them.
- The profession actually dissuades efficiency. Think about it, lawyers are paid by the hour. No clients understand what work is necessary or not to achieve their objective, so they can’t second-guess work that is done. Nor can they second-guess the status of their cases, for the same reasons. Finally, there’s no way for a client to tell whether an hour was spent efficiently or not. It’s the dumbest idea in the history of paid labor.
- Managing attorneys have no incentive to treat lower-level attorneys as anything but machines. There doesn’t need to be any humanity in this profession. A law firm makes money by paying their attorneys a small percentage of the hourly rate that they charge clients. In other words, they pay a wholesale price for work that they turn around and sell at retail prices. This profit margin is all that matters for a firm. There’s no distinction between a disgruntled attorney’s hour of work versus a happy attorney’s hour of work. If an attorney wants to go to his kid’s soccer game, it’s just one hour less of profit for the firm. It really is that cold. If a managing attorney treats junior attorneys as anything more than machines it’s out of the goodness of his heart. An hour is an hour is an hour.
- It’s one of the most elitist, segregated professions.
- Most lawyers don’t get paid that well for the work that they have to put in. For any nonlawyer, I challenge them to take the hours at their jobs that they actually do work (no time spent socializing, eating lunch, going to the bathroom, surfing the net, etc.) and then take their annual salary and divide it by the number of hours. Then ask a lawyer to take his salary and divide it by the number of billable hours he puts in. You’d be surprised.
- Litigation isn’t about justice. It’s most often about who has more money. There’s rarely satisfaction in that.
- You do nothing but push paper. There’s rarely a sense of accomplishment. Being a lawyer made me envy construction workers and ditch diggers.
- In a related note, litigation is really slow. It can take 1-2 years to get absolutely nowhere. Then 1-2 more to think that you’re getting somewhere. Then another year to realize you didn’t get anywhere.
- The cost of law school tuition will put most lawyers in debt so deep that it’s rarely justified by the salary they make when they get out of school. This is especially true for schools that are not well-known.
- Most lawyers wear bad suits that are out of date or in bad hues, like olive green, which never looks good on anybody.